What is the distinction between the lengths returned by String.length() and String.getBytes().length?

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String.length() returns the number of characters in the String while String.getBytes().length returns the number of bytes used to represent the characters in the String using the specified character encoding. The length returned by String.getBytes().length can be different for different character encodings. For example, a String containing only ASCII characters will have the same length for both String.length() and String.getBytes("UTF-8").length, but may have a different length for String.getBytes("ISO-8859-1").length.